The Death Penalty is Wrong Essay

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The death penalty is absolutely outrageous. There is no real reason that the government should feel that it has the right to execute people. Capital punishment is murder just as much as the people being executed murdered. The is no need for the death penalty and it needs to be abolished. It goes against the Constitution which states that there will be no cruel and unusual punishment. There is nothing crueler than killing a person.
A perfect example of the death penalty going awry is the state of Illinois. Former governor George Ryan has put a stay on all executions. This came as a result of finding thirteen death row inmates not guilty of their convicted crimes. Also, by staying executions, Illinois is not spending the three…show more content…

The same if they have money goes if the prisoner has information for the government, or is a member of the mob. If the murderer was smart enough to travel to a country that opposes capital punishment, the government would most likely reduce that person’s sentence to life without the possibility of parole to bring them back to the United States (Shipp).
Many people who are supporters of the death penalty say that it’s a successful deterrent. But this isn’t true because the death penalty is administered very inconsistently and arbitrarily. “Only a small proportion of first-degree murders is sentenced to death, and even fewer are executed” (Bedau). There are also several states that have a lower criminal rate without using capital punishment. For example Wisconsin, Iowa, and Michigan all get along just fine without the use of the death penalty. Also “…all other Western industrial countries get along quite well without killing their citizens” (Ryan). There are many judges that are against the use of capital punishment as well.
“A federal judge in Vermont has become the second magistrate in two months to say the current national death penalty law is unconstitutional. U.S. District Judge William Sessions ruled in Vermont that the federal Death Penalty Act does too little to ensure that the fights of defendants in death-penalty cases are safeguarded” (Second Judge…

the only discrimination. "During the 1980s and aerially 1990s, only about 1 percent of all those on death row were women, even though women commit about 15 percent of all criminal homicides" (Bedau).
Discrimination is increasingly less if money is a factor. Chances are that one will not get convicted for the death penalty. " Associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: "I have yet to see a death case in which the defendant was well-represented at trial" (Shipp). The same if they have money goes…

convicted felons. While the truth of the matter remains; there will always be someone killing innocent victims, sometimes for reasons unknown. Instead of seeking to abolish the death penalty completely, it seems we should turn our focus in to proving the convicted felons guilt or innocence before sentencing them to death.
It is hard to imagine that a murderer could possess any moral standards or even a level of self-consciousness. From a retributivist’s standpoint, a person who is capable of taking…

“I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that the death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.”
– Margaret Thatcher
The death penalty has been promoted for thousands of years, for countless…

Washington DC and twelve states have no death penalty. They are: Alaska, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. (Demographics, 1996, pgs. 2-3)
At the end of 2001, 37 prison systems had 3, 581 prisoners on death row. Fifty one of them were women. Between 1977 an 2001, 11% of the prisoners on death row were executed. (Capital Punishment 2001) But we must remember the death penalty is irrevocable. A prisoner discovered…

punishments since 1978. Trials that can result in the death penalty are 20 times more expensive on tax payers than those that can’t. The death penalty should be abolished world-wide. There are plenty of reasons that the death penalty should be outlawed. Cost, wrongful convictions and executions of innocent people, and the suffering of the accused are the main reasons (EJUSA, n.d.).
To begin, most people do not realize that carrying out one death penalty costs roughly 20 times more than keeping that same…

Against the Death Penalty
“Murder is wrong” (“Capital Punishment”). We’ve been taught this indisputable truth since childhood. The death penalty is defined as one human taking the life of another. Coincidentally, that is a classification of murder. There are as many as thirty-six states with the death penalty, and it’s essential that they change it. The United States needs the death penalty abolished because it is filled with flaws, cruel and immoral, and is an ineffective means of deterrent…

It is irrational to think that the death penalty – a remote threat at best – will avert murders committed in drug turf wars or by street-level dealers” (Bedau). This shows that the death penalty is not stopping murders from occurring. The introduction to the death penalty conducted a survey were top criminologists stated that the death penalty does not deter homicide rates (Introduction). “For 2009, the average Murder Rate of Death Penalty States was 4.9 [Murder rates by the 100,000], while the average…

than a death penalty court case (Sharp). Court costs are so much because life without parole cases can be lengthy and last for years. People who like the thought of life without parole would rather see criminals put in jail for life instead of killed. Also, people argue that the death penalty is more expensive because of the court cost which is in fact not true. As I have shown, the life without parole cases cost millions more than a death penalty case.
When addressing the death penalty, the…

rules.
My next reason for being against the death penalty is the fact that taxpayers waste too much of their money with the death penalty. The average death penalty case is appealed at least three times. This means that “we”, the taxpayers, must pay for the same trial to be heard at least three times. After a while this adds up and becomes expensive. Also, the average convicted murderer spends 12 years on death row. If people who support the death penalty are positive enough to kill the person for…

people from our communities, but it should be in a humane way. I believe death by lethal injection should be the way the death penalty should be carried out, because death by lethal injection is a pain free death and the most humane approach.
Many states don’t allow the death penalty anymore and I believe it’s because they think its inhumane and a morally wrong thing to do. I don’t believe all criminals should be sentenced to death, just criminals who will spend the rest of their lives in prison. There…